I technically ended my stint at Washington College in a committed learning process called being a undergraduate on December 16, 2009. That night I went to the Bird with my best friend and played pool for a few hours. Some random old men hit on us, and we alerted our male friends that they’d better get their asses to the bar before we were further accosted. Male friends showed up, which made us feel slightly less at risk, but these “Bird”-ly gems did not cease in their advances. One of them called me “Sugar britches.” Another slightly younger man from the same blossoming wealth of young gentlemen at the bar asked if he could put his arm around me so the two of us could walk around the bar together. I couldn’t see what purpose this would serve; he said something about his friends thinking he was a pansy.

Anyway. My point is that if I go to the bar with my lovely best friend on another Wednesday night, this very same thing could happen. And not specifically Wednesday either.

In the days before my Senior Comprehensive Exams, I holed myself up in my room for hours, living on apples and hot tea. With my cat draped across my lap, annoyingly barring my wrists a resting place from the incessant typing, I did more work than I had all semester. (Also, I’m slightly insane. My fall/spring breaks often consist of me getting all of my homework for the rest of the semester done as to not impede upon my social life. I get things done, I do, but I really, really like to have a good time). While I know my days of syllabi and an incessant stream of demanding papers are over as long as I avoid grad school, I am instead chugging away upon my portfolio for Sophie Kerr. Everything I write may be concerned with cats and apples and hot tea, but this facet of my life, incessant typing and cabin fever emerging from too many hours in my bed, is certainly not over. Not to mention the resume, applications, and job sites I’m currently surfing. That undermines the attempt at creative flow I am conducting, so I will not further go into that. I still hang out with all of the same friends from WAC and those that graduated before me. I frequent the same restaurants and bars. Every Tuesday night, my beautiful friends and I have dinner at our house. One of us cooks. It is adorable. I still baby-sit for the same families, the same sweet kids, the same bitch kids that bite and scream and throw the food you’ve made them on the floor. My mom still calls and asks too many questions. My sister still texts me pointless things like, “I can’t go to bed right now because there is a prayer group going on in my dorm room.” I still get flat tires. I still wish my hair were longer or fuller or blonder. The thing that has changed is so subtle. It runs beneath me like the ice below the snow that will surely bust someone’s ass when the moment is right. It lurks around corners, waiting to unearth me from the clouds of pleasantness that delusion allows.

After being home for Christmas for a few days, I got home late from a friend’s house and sat down with my mom in the living room. I promptly started crying hysterically because “WHAT THE HELL AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE?” There had been nothing to warn her about the outburst that ensued that evening. I’d had this spiel prepared for my relatives and other rude people who chose to ask me about my future. I planned to talk about loving books and writing, but knowing writing wasn’t reliable so I wanted to find a job in publishing or something literary like that. I planned to say all this without knowing what the hell I was even talking about. Publishing, in my head, looks like that sweet library in Beauty and the Beast, but on steroids and very lucrative. That is insane, I know. And I lived in that insane world for my last semester at WAC. I walked around like, “Yeah, I’m done in a few weeks. No more work for me!” all the time ignoring the sad truth that along with no work, there was very well no future outside of perhaps pumping gas. And to do that, I’d have to go back to New Jersey even, and some things are just not options.

These days, I’m attempting to fill my life with more than pointless Disney daydreams and hopes that life will somehow work its way out. I really am online a lot, looking at jobs, thinking about the future, talking to people. Sometimes I get confused and relapse, and spend my days on facebook and lamebook and texts from last night. That does not change. New photos posted of a night out in Baltimore sidetracked many a college paper. What has changed is the seriousness of what I’m avoiding. The night I cried to my mom was the night I realized I had no clue what I wanted to do. Period. And I have no better answer for you now, really. But then again, you did not ask.